Violence in Sports

Re the proposal to discuss violence in sports: Perhaps this is not quite
on
point, but I am gathering string for a story on acts of violence (or other
instances of criminal behavior) by college athletes. I'd welcome any tips,
be
they from the police blotter or the scholarly literature.

If you are compiling literature on college athletics and violence, you
must examine what occured at a collegiate hockey game in eastern Canada.
Although I cannot remember the two universities who participated in the
game, the result was that a poor call by the referee resulted in virtual
gang violence by the injured team against the official. They swarmed
around the referee in a circle and began to taunt and assualt him both
verbally and physically. This resulted in a massive investigation by
both the Police and the CIAU executive. In fact, Ken Dryden, the former
Montreal Canadiens goaltender and an attorney, was brought in to learn of
the behaviour and render a verdict against the schools in question.

In your recent querry, you not only asked about recent stories,
but scholarly works dealing with violence in sport. Have you looked at
Robert J. Higgs' "God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America"?
While the book may not be exactly what you had in mind, Higgs attempts to
create an overarching view of sport and culture that weaves together
religion, sport, professionalism, the university, and the basic threads of
American history, including violence. If not immediately useful for your
purposes, Higgs' book might spur your thinking on the subject of violence
or move it in new directions.

While on the subject, would anyone else who has read Dr. Higg's
book care to comment? Without reviewing it, I will say that I appreciated
the effort to bring so many themes together into one study, and Dr. Higgs
deserves credit for many of the insights included in his attempted
synthesis. However, I fear that the overarching paradigm -- the
knight/shepherd dichotomy -- may be too simplistic, and as an historian in
training, I do have reservations about the evidence. Often supporting
broad generalizations, Higgs' evidence seems better suited to the support
of more restricted pronouncements about specific times or regions. For
instance, I do not believe that most contemporary historians of the
frontier would accept the idea that the American frontier was monolithic
or that any one time or place was truly representative of the frontier
experience elsewhere, yet Higgs relies heavily on evidence from the Old
Southwest for his argument about America at large. Still, I found the
work well worth reading, and having studied under Dr. Higgs, I appreciate
the effort he has made.

I'd suggested this topic to Judy Hakola a while ago
and I should probably elaborate: I'd like to get the ideas of others
interested in sport literature on the prevalence of violence
in sport-related texts. It seems to me that violence--
deliberate or accidental--appears in novels and other texts
about sport in great disproportion to its occurrence in actual
sport, particularly in North America, where our sporting events
are relatively mild, innocuous, and highly policed / undersurveillance
compared to other parts of the world.

In particular, violent events are endemic in baseball
stories. While baseball has much potential for accidental mayhem,
it's becoming rarer in the sport all the time as equipment and
safety consciousness gets better. Yet in baseball *novels*
people are simply slaughtered left and right. To cite one recent
example--
the story "Zanduce at Second" by Ron Carlson, which appeared in
*Harper's* in May 1994, where the whole plot revolves around the
tendency of a star ballplayer to kill fans with line drives.
(I, myself, am mortally afraid of line drives. I always sit
in the center field bleachers, and even then I'm nervous
when Juan Gonzalez comes up :). But people actually *don't* get killed
by baseballs and they don't even get hurt very often.
In baseball fiction, though, it's the most natural thing in
the world.

I'd like to discuss: WHY is there all this bloodshed in writing
about our peaceful pastoral sport and HOW do you deal with
it (some is pretty gruesome) in teaching literature? Which might lead to
discussions of how one teaches the literature and/or film of
graphic violence generally.

Dr. Higgs' book has already been sent out to a list member for formal
review and should appear on H-Arete within 90 days. It should be noted
that the book was also nominated for a Pulitzer prize last year, and
is the culmination of many years of extraordinary scholarship.

On the topic of reviews, anyone on the list who is interested in
reviewing for H-Arete with a possible reprint in _Aethlon_ should send
pertinent information and areas of interest to sla@etsu.etsu-tn.edu.
There is a very good possibility of procurring review copies for your
use. Additionally, anyone who subscribes to other lists that cite
new books in the field should pass those along to this list, thus, we
can get the review cycle moving along. Thanks. Joyce Duncan, SLA